Cyberpunk 2077 Interview

Those of you excited for or curious about CD Projekt's Cyberpunk 2077 should check out this recent WCCFTech interview with Alvin Liu, CD Projekt's UI coordinator. The interview starts by going over the game's themes, factions and celebrity cameos, but then it pivots more towards a systems-focused discussion. As a result we can learn a bit about Cybrepunk 2077's NPC behavior, weather effects, difficulty settings, open world mechanics, romances, and so on. Even the developers' decision to go with a first-person perspective gets a mention.

Here are a few sample questions:

Will there be multiple difficulty settings as in The Witcher 3?

Yes, of course, of course. The most fun one I think will be the Hardcore setting where we turn off the UI you live as well. And that will be a real challenge for a lot of players. Also, at the same time, if you want to play more casually for the story and maybe you’re not experienced with shooters, which was a real big concern for us. We want to tell a story and maybe you’re a big fan of The Witcher and you’re not comfortable playing a shooter, we have settings available for that. We even have weapons for that. If you recall from last year’s demo, we had a weapon called the smart gun, which helps you aim. The bullets were much slower and usually a bit weaker. But if your aiming isn’t your forte, you can always pick up the smart gun.

There was a bit of negative feedback regarding your choice to go with a first-person view only for Cyberpunk 2077. Some people also have issues with nausea and similar medical conditions.

We’re going to have many settings for that, starting with a Field-of-View (FoV) slider. We’re also considering accessibility at a very strong level, including stuff like subtitles for people who might have trouble reading some of the text in our game. That’s very important for us. But with the first-person perspective, we are able to do a lot of new stuff, we can do much more immersive dialogue for example compared to the last game (The Witcher 3) where it was kind of obvious when you were going into combat because you saw the black bars, the camera would move… But in this game, since it’s first-person, literally you can shoot someone within a second. You pull the gun and you’re immediately shooting people. That to us is really important and really immersive because it feels like danger. It was one of the big reasons why we actually switched from third-person.

There are still times when you see your character though, right?

Yeah. Even in the demo we saw today, a lot of people might have missed it, but driving was in third-person and the transition was very seamless.